


Picking Your Side of the Line

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Attempted Murder, Canon Compliant, Death, Family Secrets, Gen, Moral Dilemmas, Morality, Pre-Series, Revenge, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: None. - Warning
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3166967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate goes looking for payback when Blackpoole refuses to pay the claim for Sam's treatment.  Unfortunately the man he wants to hire for the job has an unusual definition of morality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picking Your Side of the Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prettysophist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettysophist/gifts).



> I love stories of situational morality, and when prettysophist had a prompt for pre-series fic involving pitting the morality of at least two of the team against each other...well, I couldn't resist. Thank you for playing with us!

In the end it took five of his co-workers to pry him off Blackpoole. Ian was on his knees on the carpet that all by itself would have paid for another three days treatment for Sam, red-faced and coughing for breath. “You’re a murderer!” Nate was screaming as they dragged him out of Ian’s office. “You’ve killed my son!”

They took him to the street – he still had personal items in his office that would need to be reclaimed at some point, but no one was actually stupid enough to think that Nathan Ford still worked for IYS – least of all Nathan Ford.

 _Sam’s going to die._ The awareness was so all consuming, his knees buckled and he dropped to the pavement. One or two passersby paused as if thinking they should help him, but one look at his face convince them of the error of their ways. _My son is going to die. My son. Is going. To die._

Covering his head with his arms, he wept.

After what seemed like an eternity, he felt a familiar hand on his arm. “Enough. Come on Nate – you’re scaring people.” He looked up into the face of Jim Sterling – his only remaining friend at IYS at this point.

“He won’t pay.” Shivering now, Nate hugged his knees to his chest. “Ian won’t pay the claim. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Jim.”

Sterling’s expression was sympathetic. “Maggie asked me to make sure you didn’t end up in jail tonight. Are you going to cooperate, or do I have to get rough?”

Nate knew the other man was trying to nudge him out of his despair, but even though the metaphorical hand was right in front of him, he couldn’t muster the energy to reach for it. “She knows what happened?”

After a beat, Sterling nodded. “She didn’t say who called, but you don’t attack the boss and keep it under wraps.” He paused. “Let’s go to Chelsea’s, huh? Have a beer and figure out what your next step is?”

 _Next step._ The next step was that his son – an innocent child – was going to vanish from the earth. He and Maggie and a few others would grieve, and then life would slowly rotate back to normal. Sooner than was fair or right, Sam Ford would be a distant memory.

Nate reached out and let Sterling haul him to his feet. _Not this time._ His son would not leave this earth before somebody paid for it.  
********************************************  
Los Angeles always made Eliot Spencer’s skin crawl. A lot of it had to do with his twin – the “City of the Angels” was where the eldest Spencer (“Eight minutes, Eliot…it’s a lifetime.”) plied his trade as attorney to the supernaturally powerful and morally bankrupt.

 _You need to call him,_ his conscience nagged as he slid into a booth at the back of the diner he’d specified for his meeting. It wasn’t just a family thing – Eliot had made a tidy fortune doing odd jobs for his brother over the years. Everything from investigator to collection agent; so long as he didn’t ask too many of the wrong questions, the payouts were more than worth the hassle.

Family business wasn’t going to get in the way of this meeting though – the request had come through the usual channels, but the person looking to hire him was literally the last person Eliot would have expected. The art world had been buzzing for months about the fate of one Nathan Ford – top insurance investigator to the most powerful insurance company in the business. Eliot’s most reliable sources told him the man’s young son had come down with an extremely rare, always fatal disease. Ford had spun off the rails professionally – abandoning everything in his life to search for a cure.

It occurred to Eliot as he ordered coffee from the flirty waitress assigned to his table that something more than being back in Los Angeles might be responsible for Lindsey being so heavily on his mind. His twin had connections that could yield all kinds of impossible treasures – including cures for always-fatal diseases. Privately he hoped Ford wasn’t heading down that road. Eliot had no doubt Lindsey could provide a cure for Nate Ford’s son. It was the price tag that was the problem.

The bells hanging from the front door rang – drawing his focus. While art wasn’t his area of expertise, he and Nate Ford had crossed paths on enough occasions that the sight of the man now made the hair on the back of Eliot’s neck come to attention. “Coffee for my friend too, darlin’,” he said as the waitress brought him his drink. “Black.”

Ford reached him just as he finished the order. For a moment he looked as though he was going to protest the gesture, then just as quickly the desire passed from his expression. “Order whatever you want off the menu,” Eliot said impulsively. ‘My treat.”

“I don’t need your charity,” the older man said as he slid into the booth across from Eliot. His movements were slow and stiff, and he looked as if he hadn’t changed his clothes in a few days. Eliot’s nose also caught the whiff of stale whiskey.

“How’s your boy?” he asked, but based on Ford’s expression that clearly wasn’t the right question either. “All right,” he sighed, “tell me why I’m here.”

If Eliot thought he’d reached a point in his life where he couldn’t be surprised anymore, the next moment proved him wrong. There was something unhinged in the eyes that met his, and Nate Ford – the man who had built his reputation in insurance investigation as one of the most honest men in the business – said without a hint of self-consciousness, “I want you to kill somebody.”  
***************************  
Nate wasn’t sure when he’d decided to kill Ian, but once he did the only person that came to mind to help him guarantee the job was done properly was Eliot Spencer. Spencer was rumored to have committed dozens of contract killings discreetly, efficiently, and without leaving traces that could be linked back to his employers.

He was dimly aware that he’d surprised the hitter, but Spencer’s only outward display of emotion was sitting back in his seat and studying Nate as if trying to figure out what the catch was. “Your…circumstances…have left you short on cash,” he said finally. “How do you plan on meeting my fee?”

“I can pay you in goods,” he said. “The cumulative value should be more than your fee.” There was a small part of Nate’s brain that was well and truly horrified at what he was proposing, but he knew it would take IYS a while to entirely cut off his access. After decades spent chasing the world’s greatest thieves, he was fairly confident he could pull of a heist of his own. And if he was wrong and ended up getting caught, he would be no worse off than he was now.

Spencer was still studying him. “You’re not in any shape to be making this kind of decision, Ford. This is not the kind of move you can take back – I can’t take this contract and then deal with your buyer’s remorse down the line.”

 _That’s it then._ “I’ll find somebody else, then,” he said, starting to push to his feet. In a flash Eliot’s hand was on his wrist then, and he was once again looking into the hitter’s surprisingly sympathetic gaze.

“Tell me who the target is. Help me understand why.”

Slowly, cautiously, Nate eased back into his seat. “Ian Blackpoole,” he said – the name tasting poisonous on his tongue. “CEO of IYS Insurance.”  
*****************************************  
It didn’t take much to put the pieces together. Eliot exerted a gentle pressure until Ford was back in his seat, then forced himself not to let his personal reactions to the proposal show. “Indulge me,” he said firmly. “Order food, then give me the details.”

After a long, tense moment, Nate nodded. When Eliot signaled the waitress, he ordered a morning breakfast skillet, then asked for cream for his coffee.

“All right,” Eliot said when they were alone again. “Talk.”

He supposed there were no real surprises as the story unfolded, up to and including Ford coming to him for what little justice the world was going to allow in these circumstances. “And you really think you can pull together enough property to make my price?” he asked. Ford’s order had arrived, and the man had fallen to eating with a desperation that belied his earlier refusal.

“It will take them at least two weeks to completely eliminate my access. I also have two other sets of access codes to the property vaults, so as long as I can get in and out of the building, you’ll have your price.”

It had been a long time since Eliot had worried about traditional morality – it was more of a hindrance than a help in his line of work. There was something about Ford’s proposal that continued to bother him, however. _Murder changes a man,_ he thought, weighing his options and deciding on his course of action. Nate Ford might be able to use Eliot to get a sort of Biblical justice for his son, but when the dust settled young Sam would be just as dead, and when full realization sank in of what he’d set in motion the guilt would destroy the “honest man”.

“Don’t make a move for forty-eight hours,” he said finally as the check arrived. “I’ll contact you and let you know how we’re going to proceed.”  
****************************************  
It didn’t take a full forty-eight hours for Nate to learn that he’d been conned. “Ian’s had IT working round the clock to change every access code in the company,” Sterling reported. He’d come by the hospital to visit and ended up dragging Nate to the cafeteria with Maggie’s blessing.

He’d thought he would be angry, but they’d met with Sam’s doctor that morning. His son only had days left, and thoughts of cold blooded murder – even in the name of revenge – were small comfort in the face of such an all-consuming loss. _Why did Spencer do it, though?_ That was a puzzle that teased at his brain in a way few things had in recent months.

“You never would have forgiven yourself,” the man himself revealed when they met later that evening. “Once you began to heal from your grief, you would start thinking about the kind of example this sort of revenge sets and you would start thinking about how your son would feel about what you had put into motion.”

“We don’t know each other that well,” Nate retorted, but there was no heat in it. He liked to think of himself as inscrutable, but Eliot had just walked through his thought processes as comfortably as if they were his own.

“This isn’t your world, Mr. Ford,” Eliot said grimly. “Honor your son’s memory. Stay safe on your own side of the line.”


End file.
